“Secrets are generally terrible. Beauty is not hidden, only ugliness and deformity.”
L.M. Montgomery
Damp Rock Wall Along a Hiking Trail Damp Rock Wall Along a Hiking Trail
As I hiked this past Sunday, I was looking very closely at a wall of rocks. I have hiked here before and was on the hunt for spring wildflowers. I remember this wall as one of the first places I have seen Heuchera americana (Coral Bells) growing in the wild.
I do that. I remember the wild places I first saw plants I know well from nurseries and garden centers and gardens. I remember the Pine Barren creek where I first saw Itea virginica (Sweetspire) and the Pine Barrens lake where I saw Sarracenia purpurea (Pitcher Plants) and Drosera sp. (Sundews) growing wild. My first wild PawPaw (Asimina triloba) patch along the Potomac River. I remember my first wild Gentiana andrewsii (Bottle Gentian) viewed from the cockpit of my whitewater boat and my sister’s patience as I delighted in seeing a wild Hydrangea quercifolia(Oakleaf Hydrangea) for the first time in a Mississippi forest. The pine needle strewn forest floor in New England where I saw my first Lady Slipper Orchid (Cypripedium acaule). The place where I first witnessed the majesty of a Sequoia sempervirens (Coast Redwood) is indelibly etched in my mind.
Pink Lady’s Slipper (Cypripedium acaule) in a New Jersey forest.
On occasion I get back to these places and revisit those plants. And on this hike I was on the search for my rock-face-hanging Coral Bells. While searching, three types of ferns I saw clinging to this wall, Early Saxifrage ( in bloom, and Columbine leaves with tight buds just above the moss hinting of the red and yellow spectacle to come all came into view. I did find Coral Bells too.
Spleenwort Fern of some kind Walking Fern (Camptosaurus rhizophyllus)Early Saxifrage (Saxifraga virginiensis)Early Saxifrage (Saxifraga virginiensis)Early Saxifrage (Saxifraga virginiensis)
On this day I also noticed some one had tucked little non-natural treasures into the tapestry of moss, roots and leaves. I found a tiny duck, a little bunny, a unicorn and a turquoise snake.
So here I was, nose inches from the wall, investigating these tiny treasures when I hear a woman with a dog behind me. “Excuse me,” she says, “I am nosy. What are you looking at?”
“Plants,” I tell her, “I am a horticulturist.”
“Oh” she says. She goes on to tell me how she grew up in the area and nearly 70 years ago she remembers seeing Jack-in-the-Pulpits (she describes them and asks me if that’s the correct name and I tell her yes) and how she fell in love with them. She was amazed by them and remembers seeing them everywhere, but as she got older, she didn’t see them as much and then they disappeared. Almost 70 years later, she told me, she was hiking back in this same spot and there was a Jack-in-the-Pulpit. She said she was so excited. It brought back so many happy memories of her childhood and she was surprised. It looked like the only one around.
“So I dug it up and took it home.” she shares with me, in a hushed tone that speaks to understanding this was wrong.
Jack-in-the-Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum), in my backyard – naturally. Continue reading →
As a single person I have been thinking a lot about selection.
When considering another person to share time and space and energy with I have criteria I would like that person to meet. These criteria are different depending on the circumstances – are you going to be a friend… or are you going to be um.. more than a friend? I have a list of “need to haves” and “neat to haves” applying to either scenario.
As a horticulturist I think about selection too.
On a recent vacation I just happened to be on the trails at the exact right time to find mountain laurels in full bloom. Though I hike a lot, I often find myself in mountain laurel areas thinking to myself “I have to remember to come back here when these will be in full bloom.” And then not getting back to them until the same time the next year, if at all. So I was thrilled to find myself in multiple places with these beauties in full show.
What really caught my attention as I wandered these trails was the variation in color of the mountain laurel flowers.
Notice, in the photos above, all the color variation of the mountain laurels I found in my recent travels. These are naturally occurring wild species of this plant – Kalmia latifolia. The flowers on different plants ranged from pure white with no sign of pink at all to solid dark pink and every variation in between. A dark pink one could be right next to a pure white one.
A cultivar, or cultivated variety of a plant, is a selection. The characteristics it features were selected by someone who thought they added value to the plant – could be disease resistance, cold hardiness, double flowers, purple foliage, etc. You can tell a cultivar when you are purchasing plants by the name in ‘single quotes’ on the plant name tag. If it has a name in single quotes you have a cultivar on your hands.
A cultivar is different from the straight species of a plant. The straight species is the one that grows in the wild and is only modified by mother nature. Natural variations abound within straight species of plants and this is where a lot of cultivars come from.
This type of genetic variation is where plant selections come from. Plant breeders would take seeds or cuttings of the plants with the interesting and desirable traits and try to create plants that reliably demonstrate these characteristics. Then they give the plant a marketable name and put it out for sale. The dark pink mountain laurels so popular at garden centers are cultivars of these I found in the wild. In fact there are more than 75 cultivars of mountain laurel.
Unlike when we get to choose people, based on our lists of wants and needs and likes and dislikes, for the most part, we are only able to choose plants that have been designed for us. These plants have been chosen for us out of myriad genetic combinations and mutations happening out there in nature based on what marketers think will sell well, what horticulturists find interesting and what problems hybridizers want to solve or niche they want to fill.
I have a goal to hike 250 miles this year. I figured this averages out to about 5 miles per week and that felt like a realistic, yet challenging, goal for me.
As of today I am 127 miles in and have been hiking at least weekly since January.
Hikes serve many purposes in my life: meditation, relaxation, connection, reflection, exploration, and education.
Here I share some of my trail education. I am always looking at the plants along my hikes, naming them if I can, and trying to figure out who they are if I can’t. Some of us call this process botanizing.
These are new-to-me plants I encountered on some of my hikes this year. Nearly every time I go out on a trail I run into a plant I have never noticed, never learned, or have long forgotten. I don’t typically take a field guide with me on the trail. I take so long taking photos on these hikes already I am afraid adding the potential for dive into a field guide around every bend would keep me from getting very far at all. So my process is to take photos of the new-to-me plant and then figure out who it is when I get home.
The photos I take are of the habitat (where it is growing); the habit (its overall form or shape); the flowers if it is blooming (close ups from top, side, bottom and front , making sure to capture the pistils and/or stamens if present); the leaves (the entire leaf, a close up of the leaf margin, the underside and a close up of the leaf veins); and the stems (focusing on color and hairs, both leaf stems and flower stems); if it is a woody plant I will also take photos of the bark and the twigs (including leaf scars).
I then come home and consult a field guide depending on the type of plant. I know there are apps for this. But I like this process of documenting the details and then when I get home from a hike diving into these details and solving my personal mystery using a book, with pages and an index. I find when I do this, these plants stick with me and I remember them forever.
Of course, this is not a fool-proof system and sometimes I need to revisit the plant (aw shucks… another hike) to gather intel on some teeny tiny detail that separates one species from another.
Here are a few of the new-to-me plants I did figure out and will now know forever:
A golden Sugar Maple leaf, Acer saccharum, manages to perch perfectly on a twig between the creek and the trail.
For many the pandemic inspired people to get out on the trails, into parks and exploring nature, maybe for the first time, maybe to places they have never been. For me, the pandemic had the opposite effect. All of the places I usually find solace in a quiet exploration I found teeming with people, uncomfortable, crowded and unpleasant. The trails that brought me peace and an opportunity to contemplate and observe were now obstacle courses of bikers, joggers and walkers. And so I avoided my favorite places.
6 months into the pandemic, my friend and I began venturing on early morning bike rides. The area was opening up. Group activities and businesses were finding their new way to engage people and less people were hitting the trails, especially early. Eventually, after quite a few bike rides, I felt I could walk, and contemplate and recharge and observe out in my favorite natural places again.
Ahhhhh… Breathe in…. Breathe Out…
Listen to the crunch of the gravel under your feet…
Listen to the rippling of the creek down below…
Stop every five seconds to take another photo of the beauty that surrounds you.
Pale purple flowers of Blue Wood Aster, Symphyotrichum cordifolium, and the bright yellow leaves of Spice Bush, Lindera benzoin. Note the empty trail.
The Perkiomen Trail, my favorite stretch being the Crusher Road Access to Spring Mount, felt peaceful and accessible and enjoyable again.
Poison Ivy Toxicodendron radicans crawls up a homeowner’s fence putting on a bicolor show.
It is not that I stopped exploring nature during my Pandemic Pause from the Perkiomen Trail. Interestingly early on in the pandemic car traffic became so light I felt comfortable walking the narrow, unlined, hilly, curving roads around my home and began taking suburban safaris finding two 3.5 mile routes that took me past all kinds of nature I hadn’t noticed before. Over the months I discovered native plants I thought I had to drive someplace else to see and watched the changing of the seasons right close to home.
Blue Wood Aster Symphyotrichum cordifolium edges the trail and a lone jogger in the distance.
On this day I managed to time my morning walk just right to capture the essence of autumn in the sunrise and the wildflowers. Back to my happy place, a little bit of feeling normal, in this crazy new world.
There was some evidence of the crazy I missed while avoiding the trail over the summer. Notice the trashcan stuck high up on the trees in the photo below. A remnant of the intense flooding storms we experienced over the summer.
Hunkered down in quarantine during prime spring ephemeral season has me thinking back to places I have been lucky enough to visit. It is also giving me reason to stay close to home and time to look back and write about some of the places I have explored.
In the summer a little more than a year ago I ventured solo north to Vermont for a week. Meandering the unfamiliar roads on the way home from a state park I saw a sign for this Wildflower Trail. I never miss an opportunity to get up close to wildflowers and decided to check it out.
That tree in the background – that would be an enormous tree in our eastern forests.
“Like a flea hugging its dog” Richard Powers writes about touching a Coastal Redwood in The Overstory, I am certain no more accurate a description for anything has ever been written. Had I picked up this book prior to my visit to see these behemoths in person I may have thought this sentence pure hyperbole. After visiting I know now this phrase is as accurate as any scientific description.
The Tall
Reverence
A hiker among the redwoods.
Unlike Powers, I could not come up with the words to accurately describe what I witnessed exploring the beaten paths through Redwood National and State Parks in northwestern California. I ran out of seemingly fitting adjectives in the first 100 yards, eventually becoming speechless, neck craning back as far as biology would allow to try and take in the entirety of the tallest living organisms on the planet.
A vertical panoramic of the redwood forest, as much a cathedral as anything I have entered.
I can only describe the feeling of walking in this forest for the first time as similar to that I feel when walking into a cathedral. While I do not have religious beliefs and have never attended church for services other than weddings, I have been nearly overwhelmed with a sense of reverence and awe when walking into the great cathedrals of Europe and America. The beauty, the silence, the craftsmanship, this history takes your breath away and there seem to be no words of beauty and grace and magnitude adequate to describe what surrounds you. And this is exactly how I felt walking the path into the redwood forest. Not only does the forest leave you speechless, it actually absorbs speech. Once you are 25 feet or so away from the next group of hikers their sounds disappear. Children’s laughter is absorbed into the chest-high sword ferns carpeting the floor . Couple’s chatter is soaked up into the damp mosses, lichens, huckleberries dripping from branches far overhead. Dog barks are absorbed into the foot-thick sponginess of the tree bark. Entire groups of conversation are muffled by the feet of soil building in the connections of branch to trunk, wrapped in wren song and delivered in burbling packages down the streams so essential to this ecosystem.
Mosses cover branches of understory trees
Creeks feed the trees from below
Sword ferns carpet the landscape
The soft, furry, spongy bark of a redwood can be more than a foot thick.
The Small
Insignificance
Part of the significance of these trees is how small they make you feel. Perhaps this is a function of growing where where the trees get a measly 150′ tall and 8 feet wide. Maybe those who grow up among the redwoods, do not feel as small. It is important to be reminded of our insignificance, of our short lifespan, of our smallness. It is humbling to realize these trees, some more than 1000 years old and more massive than anything else on the planet (3 times the length of the longest whale, wider at the base than two Volkswagon beetles) exist. We are just a blip on its lifespan. Blips of lifespans are shown in the tree’s rings after it falls, or has been fallen.
Evidence of drought and fire and flood and lightning can all be read in the rings of a tree stump. Except in this case, in this case the influence of man on these trees causes the stumps – so the damage we have wrought is never evidenced in the rings. We can see the rings because of our influence and interpret other details of its millennium of life, but we humans and our tiny masses and minuscule lifespan make no appearance at all. It is scary to learn what we tiny, infant humans have done to the populations of this ecosystem.
Small Remnants
You may think that when a redwood topples over naturally everything about the remnants would be enormous. And some of it is – the crater left in the landscape from the tonnage falling to earth from 30 stories above makes an impression. However, the pieces that are left, in many cases are firewood sized. This is because the tree is so massive when it hits the ground it shatters in a way the locals call ‘toothpicking’.
When these trees are harvested for that desirable redwood for our back decks and long-lasting outdoor furniture the soft undergrowth of rhododendrons, salal and understory trees, as well as all the huckleberries and ferns are bulldozed into the fall zone creating a mattress for the tree to land on, preventing the toothpicking and ruining of the lumber.
The familiar shape of the soil-ends of toppled giants
When the trees topple naturally the root masses that emerge are curiously alike. There are no long dangling roots, or half-fallen trees connected to the earth still by sinews of long anchoring roots. They are uniform and rootless. Much smaller than you would think. This is because under the surface of the soil the trees have formed a network of roots. Interconnected and interdependent. If one tree were to fall and take all of its roots with it – it would upend the entire forest. And so they have evolved weak points in their root zones, near the root flare, where the mass of roots disconnect from a tree. The tree falls leaving its roots for all others using it resulting in the uniform root mass now exposed.
Fauna
Even the large fauna feel small in this landscape. While I was laser-focused on the big trees, I was not even thinking about the wildlife we might encounter, even when we weren’t specifically looking for it. We happened upon a Roosevelt Elk just munching on ferns next to a well-travelled road. We saw a black bear cub and a fawn. We saw small birds, harbor seals and sea lions, river otters and many many snails and slugs.
Banana Slug
Just a snail on a redwood
Banana Slug on Giant Parsnip Flower
Starfish
Roosevelt Elk
Sea Lions
We saw 4 river otters floating on their backs down this portion of the Smith River. We watched as they emerged and portaged the rapids.
Accidental Perfect Location
You may be wondering how it is we saw sea lions and star fish on our trip to the redwoods. Our visit was to the Coast Redwoods, to visit Sequoia sempervirens. These tallest living beings on the planet live along the Pacific coast of southern Oregon and Northern California. They need the ocean mists to provide supplemental water and the fogs to keep the humidity up and the soils moist. They will not live outside of these conditions. They may survive This is in comparison to the Giant Redwoods, Sequoiadendron giganteum which are not quite as tall but wider than the Coast Redwoods, known as the most massive trees on Earth, and thrive inland limited to the Western Sierra Nevadas in California.
No Coast Redwoods without the Coast
What I didn’t know when I selected our amazing cabin using VRBO for the first time, was that it was in the perfect location for a plant-nerd like me and an off-road enthusiast like my companion. Turns out the 15 acre property with the middle fork of the Smith River running right through it, is surrounded by thousands of acres of the Smith River National Recreation Area. There are no tourist shops there. There is no place to get a t-shirt or any branded cardboard cutouts for your instagram selfie. Where we were there were just various ecosystems, crowdless trails and enormous trees and tiny wildflowers.
From the ground up in the Redwood Forest
We could day trip from the top of a mountain to the sands of the ocean. We hiked, a most amazing hike, from the coast into the redwood forest, hiking 9.9 miles of a 10 mile hike before we saw another human being. Eating lunch on a bridge over a creek surrounded by 300 foot tall Coast Redwoods. And this type of exploring we did, each day.
Snow covered peaks in the distance
We had a 4-wheel drive rental car because it was recommended by our cabin owner just to get in the driveway. We put it to good use. We traversed dusty switchbacks into the Six Rivers National Forest taking in the scenery from the mountain tops. Looking out at snow covered peaks and finding amazing wildflowers we had not seen int he redwood forests. Here, we found ourselves in a serpentine barren. Serpentine barrens have soils high in magnesium and low in other nutrients and are generally high in nickel. This combination makes for a unique plant community with many plants found only there.
A scene from the serpentine barrens of Smith River National Recreation Area
Accidental Timing
As I was planning this vacation, I was concerned with just one thing – seeing these trees! Imagine my surprise and delight when, as we trekked various trails, I realized we were there during spring wildflower bloom time. This made for longer, slower hiking and an ever-growing appreciation for the endless patience and understanding of my hunny as I photographed E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G in bloom.
The Bethlehem Steel Stacks is a phenomenal place to visit and see just how well a place that has outlived its original purpose can become something completely different and equally important to the surrounding community.
According to their website: “Steel Stacks is a 1-acre campus dedicated to arts, culture, family events, community celebrations, education and fun. Once the home of Bethlehem Steel, the second largest steel manufacturer in the nation, the site has been reborn through music and art…”
While you can find comedy acts, art exhibits, concerts and all kinds of other events here, in the summer of 2018 you could also get an up close look at the industrial complex that was Bethlehem Steel as well as take in some horticulture.
The Hoover-Mason Trestle (HMT) began its life as a narrow-gauge railroad to carry materials needed to make iron from the yards to the blast furnaces.
The Hare Sculpture at Stoneleigh has been an icon of the Villanova neighborhood for decades before opening to the public. This sculpture is made from a white oak trunk and features two adult rabbits and 5 young rabbits representing the Haas family. The rabbits frequently dress up for holidays and special occasions. Haas means Hare in Dutch and German.
Mother’s Day weekend, the southeastern PA region, already teeming with more than 30 public gardens, welcomed the newest public horticulture space to the map.
Stoneleigh: A Natural Garden is a property of Natural Lands.
Stoneleigh: A Natural Garden is also under threat of eminent domain. Perhaps one of the biggest blows to a public garden is a letter just prior to a grand opening regarding a school district’s intention to condemn a portion or the entirety of the gardens for ball fields and a new middle school.
The current rallying cry for Stoneleigh as it’s future is threatened by eminent domain.
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
― William Blake
Susquehanna State Park in Havre de Grace, MD is home to two Maryland champion trees. In addition to waterfalls and wildflowers I am always on the hunt for large trees. I mean I planned a road trip and vacation solely to visit a large tree. So on this weekend camping trip we happened to set up the evening’s nylon shelter in a park with some big trees. We honestly didn’t realize it until we read the trail map.
While 15 miles of trails wind their way through the forested 2,753 acres, you need only to take one of them to see these two enormous trees.
Hop on the Deer Creek Trail and follow the green blazes. The well-worn trail will lead you to the trees.
The Dumplings in the West River in Jamaica State Park VT
Welcome to Jamaica. Jamaica, Vermont. No Caribbean for me, but that is just fine. I am happy to be where the days are cool and the evenings cooler. While spring sprinted by in what felt like just a few short days at home in southeast Pennsylvania, happily it is still spring here. 43 degree evenings, days in the mid-70s. Heaven to me.
I am house sitting in this area, the southwest corner of the state, near where Vermont, New York and Massachusetts all come together and attempting to make this an inexpensive bit of time away. Spending lots of time writing and exploring and not spending money. I brought all the ingredients to make my meals and stayed away from places designed to separate me from my money opting for hiking and other botanical explorations.
If you ever find yourself in the area, plan some time to explore (botanize?) Jamaica State Park.
HORT travels 